Cultural Divergence After the Crash: Thoughts on The Only Life We Know

Regular readers of How to Save the World know that I have been struggling for a couple of years with my novel The Only Life We Know. The novel takes place at the dawn of the 23rd century, a hundred years after a combination of events have conspired to cause our civilization to crash. The human population has reached a stasis level of a few hundred million people after a precipitous collapse. Attempts by the survivors to immediately recreate civilization culture failed for a whole series of reasons revealed through the stories in the novel.

The successive generations, unfamiliar with what pre-crash civilization was about (other from what they can glean from books and digital recordings), are therefore indifferent to it, and therefore go about creating a set of completely new cultures. These new cultures are based on the physical place of the community (so the desert culture in the book is very different from the oceanside culture, and each is appropriate to its place), and based on studying the cultures of wild animal communities native to those places. The young people use animal cultures as their model because they are only models they can see that actually work. They rebel against and ultimately ignore the pleas of the ‘older generation’ of humans, who remember what civilization was, and want the young people to learn from civilization’s lessons and rebuild it. The only thing that the young people can see to learn from in their study of civilization is that it failed, horribly.

One of the theses of the novel is that while there is much we can learn from information media, we can’t really know what it’s like to live in another culture unless we experience it physically. While the immediate survivors of civilization’s collapse struggle to recreate the only life they know, the generations that follow have no tie to, or real appreciation of, such a ‘civilization’ culture, because they have no first-hand experience of it. Some technologies have survived, including books, and hand-crank operated ‘electronic’ information tools, but with the end of oil, the collapse of the energy grid, and the subsequent collapse of social, economic, business, educational and political infrastructure, most of these tools are abandoned, not because they can’t be made to work, but because they no longer ‘make sense’ in the context of a new world with no apparent use or need for them.

So these new generations of humans, using nature as their model, and salvaging whatever tools and information they find intuitively useful from the era of civilization, go about crafting, from the bottom up (there is no ‘top down’ any more), bold new human communities that work for them. Because these communities are far-flung, remote from other communities, and of necessity self-sufficient and tied to the ecology of their physical location, the cultures of these communities end up diverging wildly, and appear to the observer (and the reader) as different from each other as Incan culture was from Inuit culture. This divergence occurs despite the fact there is some cultural exchange and trade, and substantial information exchange between the cultures. A single ‘common’ language evolves, learned by everyone but secondary to each culture’s ‘native’ language, and a basic ‘natural community model’, illustrated above, also emerges, although it manifests itself in very different ways.

This natural community model reflects the fact that, to survive and be good citizens of our communities, we all need to acquire and practice certain indigenous capacities (listed on the right side of the chart) that minimize conflict, enable collaboration and demonstrate respect for others and for Gaia, of which we are (finally and again) an integral part. In addition to these capacities, we also, each individually, find that our strengths and our passions tend to be focused in one or more of the nine competency areas shown in the diamonds on the chart. Deciding how, and who to make a living with, is a matter of assessing how your strengths and passions in these areas dovetail with those of others, and how they collectively provide something of value to the community. Regular readers will recognize this as the ‘sweet spot’ at the intersection of your Gift, your Passion and your Purpose, that I’ve written about often recently, and will recognize the result of finding and working together with those whose collective Gifts and Passions meet a shared Purpose as the model for what I have called The Natural Enterprise.

Here’s a quick overview of the nine competency areas I’ve depicted above, and how they work together (I’ll have more to say about this in a future Natural Enterprise article):

1. Explorers: Scientists, researchers, anthropologists. People whose work is to study, observe, perceive and learn. Their work-product is discovery.
2. Interpreters: Teachers, philosophers, story-tellers, activists. People whose work is to teach, coach, provoke, ‘make sense’ of things, add insight to information. Their work-product is understanding.
3. Inventors: Innovators, writers. People whose work is to imagine, conceive, make stuff up, figure out how stuff might be applied. Their work-product is ideas.
4. Designers: Chefs, jewelers, architects. People whose work is to craft, specify, template, make patterns and recipes. Their work-product is models.
5. Generators: Artists, producers, manufacturers. People whose work is to make useful or enjoyable physical stuff. Their work-product is ‘goods’.
6. Nurturers: Gardeners, guardians, nutritionists, preventative health practitioners. People whose work is to cultivate and help people (and Gaia) do what they do best. Their work-product is well-being.
7. Menders: Doctors, nurses, servicers, repairers, renovators. People whose work is to restore what is damaged. Their work-product is sustenance.
8. Actors: Athletes, entertainers. People whose work is to stimulate, ‘recreate’ and refresh. Their work-product is fun.
9. Connectors: Distributors, travelers, nomads. People whose work is to distribute or redistribute stuff — ‘goods’, information, or ideas. Their work-product is communication. They are the principal physical link between communities.

The first seven competency areas flow, sort of, one to the next. Discoveries are interpreted to produce understanding, which provokes ideas, which are designed into models, which are produced as ‘goods’, which provide well-being, which is sustained by menders.

Young people in these communities are encouraged to try their hand at all of these things, to learn what their real strengths and passions are. They are also encouraged to be Nomads — to travel to and live among other communities in order to find the people they love and would love to make a living with, and to act as Connectors in that capacity.

This model is just an emergent shared framework of community roles, not a taxonomy of roles that, once chosen, defines your position in the community for life. It’s a personal navigation tool, not a pigeon-holing structure. It’s implicit in the way the communities depicted in the book operate, but is not explicit.

The novel is told in the ‘voice’ of a young Nomad recounting her experiences in twelve different communities (the book’s twelve chapters). But she changes her ‘voice’ to reflect the utterly different cultures of these communities as she becomes immersed in and part of each. So the novel is actually a collection of twelve short stories.

The novel aspires to do three things:

1.  First, it portrays the future as a utopia, not a dystopia, both to give people hope that, when civilization does collapse, the life that comes after will not be short, nasty and brutish, but actually quite wonderful, and to explain how and why it will be this way.
2. Secondly, it attempts to entertain and stimulate the imagination by telling credible and interesting stories, one per chapter, set in very different 23rd century communities, each community wildly divergent from the last. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of imagination, perhaps more than I or anyone is capable of. Each story, in addition to describing a different way to live, will also reveal something fundamental about the human condition and human nature, and will hopefully be fun (and provocative) to read as well.
3. Thirdly, the novel as a whole will be a mystery novel, as it reveals through the stories clues as to how and why the crash of civilization occurred and how and why certain surprising events followed the crash. Not just a whodunit with the Earth and modern society as the murder victims, but a mystery about human resilience, the astonishing power of human imagination, and what happens when we do what we must.

At this point I’m not expecting you to ‘buy’ the plot — I haven’t given you enough here to do that. What I’d like from you, dear reader, are two things:

• Your thoughts on the Natural Community model. What’s missing? What essential roles of an egalitarian community of, say, 150 people do not fall into any of these categories? What essential roles in a Natural Enterprise of, say 30 people within a Natural Community do not fall into any of these categories? Is there anything ‘unnatural’ about the model? It’s based on my amateur reading of anthropology and biology books and on my own observations of how things seem to work in nature and (when management permits it) in highly effective businesses.
• Some ideas on characters for the novel. I don’t want heroes. These communities have no need for heroes and not much adversity to overcome. Or perhaps it would be better to say everyone in these communities is in a way a hero. The stories are about relationships, about love, about re-learning to have fun, about sustainability. But they aren’t preachy do-gooder stories. They’re about people discovering what makes sense, and just doing sometimes-crazy stuff that is part of being human. The characters I want are big-as-life, eccentric, charming, in-the-moment, out-on-the-edge people. People who you could not imagine living in this civilization. Don’t worry about their physical appearance — I’ve got that covered (for example, one of my communities has a preponderance of Explorers — scientists — who adorn themselves in face-paint and masksthat react to light, sound, pheromones etc.) I’m looking for personalities. People completely different from anyone else you have ever met, or could imagine. They can be real or made up. They just need to be way out there.

People whose ideas I use will, of course, be acknowledged in the book.